You Don't Have to Be a Champion... to Be a Winner!

From fitting wheels to wheelbarrows in a builders’ merchant, Brian rapidly climbed the business ladder and became a Xerox salesman. He was unaware that the professional selling skills he was learning would one day propel him into the glamorous and overtly commercial world of F1.

A disastrous debut at a racing driver school was the spark that lit his passion for motor racing. Aware of the need for some serious financial backing to be able to take part, Brian embarked on a variety of highly innovative and often extremely entertaining ways of securing sponsorship, including working with the cast of a top 1970s’ BBC sit-com, as well as with John Cleese, of Monty Python fame.

A chance meeting on a plane with Max Mosley offered an opportunity of managing one of the most popular F1 Grand Prix circuits. This, in turn, led to the heady heights of a factory drive for Mercedes and the establishment of South Africa’s first racing driver school.

It was only a matter of time before Brian’s exceptional sponsorship-acquisition skills took him to F1, where he quickly made a name for himself by securing multi-million pound deals with three of the most sought after global corporations.

However, Brian’s greatest achievement in motorsport was to establish the Motorsport Industry Association in 1994, in a bid to secure government recognition of the industry in its own right. Once again, Brian’s sales skills played a key role.

Without ever becoming a household name as a motor racing champion, Brian’s story of how he most definitely became a winner is not only inspirational, but highly entertaining, amusing, often irreverent and informative.

You Don’t Have to Be a Champion... to Be a Winner is the story of Brian Sims, who left school in 1963 with just 5 GCE O-Levels and a shattered dream of following in his father’s footsteps as a Royal Air Force pilot.

Writing in Wet Cement

All these years later, nightmares of that marriage wrack my sleep. Heart pounding, I am cowering, running, trying to escape. My whimpers awaken the man now beside me, who loves me with only sweetness, kindness and laughter. He cradles me, dragging me back from the past into the joy and safety of my current life. I stare into the darkness of the night and memories. I wonder, not why did that marriage fail, but why did I allow it to last so long? To the outside world, it looked perfect. Only my mother and closest friends knew the inside reality of my life and how I was caught in the velvet trap of psychological abuse. Jayne Lisbeth was a privileged child, yet death and loss tore apart her world from an early age. The explosion of the free love and feminist movements of the 60s and 70s provided a renaissance, which slipped away during her marriage and motherhood in the 80s. Then, discovering her mother's past secrets illuminated the connections between their generations. Through that she found the courage to escape and create a new future. In deeply personal ways, Ms. Lisbeth reveals the depths of pain and elevation of joy by sharing her most intimate life experiences through sensually evocative words and painterly writing. Writing in Wet Cement is a tale which resonates with all women.

Wounds That Never Heal... 'Broken'

The events of this story are true. It begins when the author was 11 and first learnt that she had been adopted. At 19, she walked out on a wonderful family, with a husband who loved her deeply and gave her three beautiful babies. She turned her her back on them and climbed on a train to London to find her birth mother. Being innocent, she had no idea that she would soon be homeless and sleeping on park benches in Hyde Park and mixing with drug addicts, eventually working for the Maltese Mafia, who employed her as a striptease dancer in their clubs in Soho. She eventually lived with one of these Mafia men who always carried a gun and she was slowly groomed into that life. She was not allowed to go to work without being followed or watched by this violent man, although she was besotted by him. He would beat her or slap her for no reason and still she stayed. She finally escaped the violence by walking the streets yet again with nothing except the clothes she wore. Terrified, she picked up men for sex to earn money and finally met a man whom she married and who took her back to her hometown. She had witnessed violence and murder and endured violence herself, but now she is in her golden years. She has gone through four husbands, two of whom tried to murder her and almost killed her, but she can now put the truth out there for young women who are thinking of running away to London, believing the streets are paved with gold. She can assure them that they are not. Her experiences were heartbreaking, violent and soul-destroying, but she is still here to tell her story...

A childhood that could hardly be remembered, teenage years that were unforgettable, then came the unknown: fear, physical and mental abuse, pain, terror and beatings, drug abuse and going yet again into the unknown, resulting in rescue and contentment and peace... No one should travel the path I took...

This book is a must-read and should be given to any young person thinking of doing what I did... JUST DON'T, as only heartbreak will follow. It followed me and still does. That's why I remain BROKEN.

Womb to Tomb to Womb

Dawn Cogger’s memoir, Womb to Tomb to Womb, provides fodder for life’s journey, a journey with unimaginable positive changes. Her story demonstrates how our life journey and its teachings are unique for each of us. Her life starts with sporadic Christian teachings, and contrary messages that belief in God is not acceptable, her behaviour often unacceptable. Her love of nature brings her solace and inspiration. She shares her hunger for prayer and a relationship with God. The bold, yet gentle book of life memories starts as a child, travails through her moments of desperation, to a seasoned woman, nurse, spiritual director and writer. It will touch your heart, inviting transformation.Her memoir includes her struggle with the deaths of two young patients. She considered marriage to be a life-long commitment, and found it wasn’t. She went to therapy more than once. Dawn seeks and receives spiritual direction. She also walks the contemplative discernment process through the education of providing spiritual direction. As you witness her life, you’ll see her major losses turn into her gifts. Ageing and the virus COVID-19, at times seen as insurmountable challenges, bring about a grateful, inclusive, energized being. She shows the joys and woes of our lives have energy to foster: healing of a broken heart, a fulfilling relationship with God, and a life open to being true to our authentic selves.

Witness To History

For almost fifty years, Mohinder Dhillon was one of Africa’s foremost news cameramen and documentary filmmakers. This book is both a personal memoir and a photographic record of the many remarkable events he covered over the course of an extraordinary career – events that were to change the course of history.
This book is much more than a collection of photographs. It offers fascinating insights into the behaviour of contemporary African leaders: Emperor Haile Selassie, Jomo Kenyatta, William Tubman, Julius Nyerere, Milton Obote, Idi Amin, Col. Gamel Nasser, Léopold Senghor, Kwame Nkrumah, Muammar Gaddafi and Robert Mugabe among them. Mohinder’s encounters with these and other leading figures of the day took place against the backdrop of the Cold War proxy conflicts that were then tearing Africa apart.
While primarily a vivid eye-witness account of the many turbulent events that shaped Africa during and immediately after the colonial era, this wide-ranging memoir also documents events that Mohinder filmed in South Yemen, Vietnam and elsewhere in the world.
To the fore throughout is Mohinder’s deep and abiding sense of compassion, both in his approach to photojournalism and as a committed humanitarian.

Wild Colonial Boy

This autobiographical novel narrates the journey of Dan Docherty, a young Glasgow law graduate and karate black belt, who left his traditional Catholic family in 1975 to serve in the notoriously corrupt Royal Hong Kong Police.

In Hong Kong, he learned Chinese language intensively, then drill, musketry and law. A famous Tai Chi master accepted him as a disciple and trained him to become an international full contact champion.

In this book we’ll have a few beers with colourful characters like Big Don and Mountie Dave. We’ll visit exotic locales—Manila, Macao, Singapore… We’ll witness Dan in full contact competition and in street fight action. As they say in the Hong Kong Police, “If you can’t take a joke, you shouldn’t have joined.” 

Why I Wrote wot I Wrote

As Joanna Lumley notes in her preface, Bruce Denness has always trod a precarious path between serious science and philosophical frivolity. The science reached its peak at the British Geological Survey and Newcastle University in the 1970s but even then – and certainly since – he always looked for the funny side of whatever he was involved in, which may explain why his research has seldom been taken seriously.

Bruce was born in 1942 on a farm in the Isle of Wight, where he grew up. His career then took him to the mainland (or England, as it is known on the Isle of Wight) and several countries in the Caribbean, South America and the Far East before he settled back on the Island again in 1984. Experiences gained during those years have contributed to the many letters that Bruce has since had published, mainly in The Telegraph and New Scientist. Admittedly, some of them may also have been influenced by regular visits to The White Horse Inn at Whitwell, Isle of Wight for invigorating Shiraz treatment.

Who Do You Think You Are?

This is at once a personal memoir and the story of what it is like to grow up and live alienated from the values of the society into which one was born. In the deeply fissured modern world, many now find themselves similarly in places where rival ideologies and interests are tearing their worlds apart. This is an account of how awareness of such a world reveals itself. In South Africa apartheid succeeded in enshrining its own particular values in law. But the roots of what had brought its monstrosity into being have never been confined to South Africa. They remain plain to see in the world today: intolerance, bigotry, fanaticism – xenophobia, racism, nationalism. 

In this memoir, Hitler’s installation as German Chancellor and the rise of Nazism leads directly to the author’s early sense of not belonging: a growth in awareness of the reasons for the feeling and acute sensibility to the rifts and fractures lying beneath the surface of a comfortable domestic life. It clarifies how personal beliefs may become diametrically opposed to those of the society to which one belongs by birth. So the question of identity quickly arises: ‘Where do I fit in? Who am I?’ It was this that many Whites asked themselves in apartheid South Africa, but it is also one that increasingly must be asked by many today.

White Socks and Chalk Dust

Proof that truth is often stranger than fiction, this hilarious and poignant account of the unlikely journey of a mobile soft-drink salesman and sometime band member to school headship, is made still more compelling by virtue of the fact that all events leading up to and during this metaphorical mountain climb are entirely true…

White Slave

A man who is 6'6" and nearly 400 pounds casts a big shadow. Charles 'Big Chick' Huntsberry lived beneath his own shadow. He always set out to be the best at what he was doing, to be the top dog. When Chick wins an arm-wrestling contest, it leads him to a profession as a bouncer at the big campus bar. Rumours start to spread about the huge bouncer at the club. Chick starts hearing stories about a guy who would fight a whole motorcycle club and turn over cars. The person in these stories turns out to be Chick himself. An old bouncing associate calls Chick and tells him about a music artist who is looking for a bodyguard. Chick, needing a change, tries it out. The rest is music history.

White Light

Meet Andy Kent.

Husband, dad, businessman and survivor of death.

This is the story of a person’s life – the story of a life fully lived, a life touched by many others and a life that has made a difference. It hasn’t been plain sailing, and many lessons have been hard-learned along the way. From a cerebral haemorrhage he should not have survived to an impossible fund-raising walk spanning the length of the country, discover the incredible true story of a man whose mission it is to help others, whatever the cost.

Love, loss, and life combine in this inspiring account of a man who has always refused to give up, and whose determination has helped so many people.

This is Andy Kent’s story so far…

White Is Black

A patient’s journey in intensive care always starts like a tennis ball landing on top of the net, at the tipping point. Not only for the one in the bed.

Doctor Apfelstein, a specialist in the field, recounts his rise and fall; from flamboyance to custody; from the sleaziest north-east suburb of Paris where he may have killed some of his guests, to the jungle of Harley Street, and finally the flatlands of Norfolk.

He portrays the darkest recesses of his trade, the fleeting nature of life and love, and the blessings of all sorts of music: the soothing drug he needs.

When his own tennis ball lands on top of the net that separates oblivion from memories, at the tipping point, he has chosen his side. Memories. His way.

Translated from French by Brigid Purcell, PhD in European Literature, assisted by Philippe Grunstein, Fellow of the Royal College of Physicians (London), Associate Professor of Medicine, for specific vocabulary of Respiratory Medicine and Intensive care.